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Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalist Movement

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Edmund H Ankomah

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay titled “Self-Reliance” implored Americans to strive for self-improvement, to trust themselves and to achieve the triumph of their own principles. American self-reliance was originally ingrained in this nation’s lexicon until 1929’s Great Depression and the inauguration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ushered in the age of The New Deal. Today, self-reliance and New Deal-inspired progressivism are collectively as important as ever in a swiftly-changing world. Can the two co-exist?

Johannes Voelz - Transcendental Resistance - The New Americanists and Emerson's Challgenge

Johannes Voelz

Johannes Voelz offers a critique of the New Americanists through a stimulating and original reexamination of the iconic figure of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Voelz argues against the prevailing tendency among Americanists to see Emerson as the product of an “all-pervasive scope of cultural power.” Instead he shows Emerson’s philosophy to be a deft response to the requirements of lecturing professionally at the newly built lyceums around the country. Voelz brings to light a fascinating organic relationship between Emerson’s dynamic style of thinking and the uplifting experience demanded by his public. This need for an audience-directed philosophy, the author argues, reveals the function of Emerson’s infamous inconsistencies on such issues as representation, identity, and nation. It also poses a major counter-argument to the New Americanists’ dim view of Emerson’s individualism and his vision of the private man in public. Challenging the fundamental premises of the New Americanists, this study is an important, even pathbreaking guide to the future of American studies.

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy

John Lysaker

Os Efeitos do Autoritarismo práticas, silenciamentos e resistência (im)possíveis

Alan T Fernandes

Transcendentalism was stimulated by non-conformity and the urge of each individual to find a unique relation with the universe. Social activism has been one of the direct consequences of this sense of unity and paramount to ensure human dignity and environmental awareness, for instance. This paper evaluates the contemporary relevance of the works of proponents Emerson and Thoreau and the major principles of Transcendentalism to secure rightness of moral action in the face of authoritarianism.

Brittany Davis

In the wake of the Revolutionary War American writers were eager to partake in the establishment of a national identity, one free of imposing governmental and religious institutions seeking conformity and acquiescence of the mind. The collective literary works of the American Renaissance – referred to by some as the “richest period” (Reynolds) in American literature - championed individualism, idealism, and the divinity of nature as the principal characteristics of the burgeoning country’s populace. Steadfast in his pursuit of establishing a distinctly American identity, Ralph Waldo Emerson requisitioned the need for nationalistic literature that represented principal characteristics defined by the fledgling nation. With the release of his renown essay “Nature” , Emerson emphasized the importance of a nationalistic literature, and fortified the foundational concepts of the transcendental movement that were carried within the extensive literary works of the American Renaissance.

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William James and Ralph Waldo Emerson are both committed individualists. However, in what do their individualisms consist and to what degree do they resemble each other? This essay demonstrates that James's individualism is strikingly similar to Emerson's. By taking James's own understanding of Emerson's philosophy as a touchstone, I argue that both see individualism to consist principally in self-reliance, receptivity, and vocation. Putting these two figures' understandings of individualism in comparison illuminates under-appreciated aspects of each figure, for example, the political implications of their individualism, the way that their religious individuality is politically engaged, and the importance of exemplarity to the politics and ethics of both of them.

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Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism is an American literary, philosophical, religious, and political movement of the early nineteenth century, centered around Ralph Waldo Emerson. Other important transcendentalists were Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Lydia Maria Child, Amos Bronson Alcott, Frederic Henry Hedge, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and Theodore Parker. Stimulated by English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism of Herder and Schleiermacher, and the skepticism of Hume, the transcendentalists operated with the sense that a new era was at hand. They were critics of their contemporary society for its unthinking conformity, and urged that each person find, in Emerson’s words, “an original relation to the universe” (O, 3). Emerson and Thoreau sought this relation in solitude amidst nature, and in their writing. By the 1840s they, along with other transcendentalists, were engaged in the social experiments of Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Walden; and, by the 1850s in an increasingly urgent critique of American slavery.

1. Origins and Character

2. high tide: the dial , fuller, thoreau, 3. social and political critiques, primary sources, secondary sources, other internet resources, related entries.

What we now know as transcendentalism first arose among the liberal New England Congregationalists, who departed from orthodox Calvinism in two respects: they believed in the importance and efficacy of human striving, as opposed to the bleaker Puritan picture of complete and inescapable human depravity; and they emphasized the unity rather than the “Trinity” of God (hence the term “Unitarian,” originally a term of abuse that they came to adopt.) Most of the Unitarians held that Jesus was in some way inferior to God the Father but still greater than human beings; a few followed the English Unitarian Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) in holding that Jesus was thoroughly human, although endowed with special authority. The Unitarians’ leading preacher, William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), portrayed orthodox Congregationalism as a religion of fear, and maintained that Jesus saved human beings from sin, not just from punishment. His sermon “Unitarian Christianity” (1819) denounced “the conspiracy of ages against the liberty of Christians” (P, 336) and helped give the Unitarian movement its name. In “Likeness to God” (1828) he proposed that human beings “partake” of Divinity and that they may achieve “a growing likeness to the Supreme Being” (T, 4).

The Unitarians were “modern.” They attempted to reconcile Locke’s empiricism with Christianity by maintaining that the accounts of miracles in the Bible provide overwhelming evidence for the truth of religion. It was precisely on this ground, however, that the transcendentalists found fault with Unitarianism. For although they admired Channing’s idea that human beings can become more like God, they were persuaded by Hume that no empirical proof of religion could be satisfactory. In letters written in his freshman year at Harvard (1817), Emerson tried out Hume’s skeptical arguments on his devout and respected Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, and in his journals of the early 1820s he discusses with approval Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion and his underlying critique of necessary connection. “We have no experience of a Creator,” Emerson writes, and therefore we “know of none” (JMN 2, 161).

Skepticism about religion was also engendered by the publication of an English translation of F. D. E. Schleiermacher’s Critical Essay Upon the Gospel of St. Luke (1825), which introduced the idea that the Bible was a product of human history and culture. Equally important was the publication in 1833—some fifty years after its initial appearance in Germany—of James Marsh’s translation of Johann Gottfried von Herder’s Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1782). Herder blurred the lines between religious texts and humanly-produced poetry, casting doubt on the authority of the Bible, but also suggesting that texts with equal authority could still be written. It was against this background that Emerson asked in 1836, in the first paragraph of Nature : “Why should we not have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs” (O, 5). The individual’s “revelation”—or “intuition,” as Emerson was later to speak of it—was to be the counter both to Unitarian empiricism and Humean skepticism.

An important source for the transcendentalists’ knowledge of German philosophy was Frederic Henry Hedge (1805–90). Hedge’s father Levi Hedge, a Harvard professor of logic, sent him to preparatory school in Germany at the age of thirteen, after which he attended the Harvard Divinity School. Ordained as a Unitarian minister, Hedge wrote a long review of the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge for the Christian Examiner in 1833. Noting Coleridge’s fondness for “German metaphysics” and his immense gifts of erudition and expression, he laments that Coleridge had not made Kant and the post-Kantians more accessible to an English-speaking audience. This is the task—to introduce the “transcendental philosophy” of Kant, (T, 87)—that Hedge takes up. In particular, he explains Kant’s idea of a Copernican Revolution in philosophy: “[S]ince the supposition that our intuitions depend on the nature of the world without, will not answer, assume that the world without depends on the nature of our intuitions.” This “key to the whole critical philosophy,” Hedge continues, explains the possibility of “a priori knowledge” (T, 92). Hedge organized what eventually became known as the Transcendental Club, by suggesting to Emerson in 1836 that they form a discussion group for disaffected young Unitarian clergy. The group included George Ripley and Bronson Alcott, had some 30 meetings in four years, and was a sponsor of The Dial and Brook Farm. Hedge was a vocal opponent of slavery in the 1830s and a champion of women’s rights in the 1850s, but he remained a Unitarian minister, and became a professor at the Harvard Divinity School.

Another source for the transcendentalists’ knowledge of German philosophy was Germaine de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker) (1766–1817), whose De l’Allemagne ( On Germany ) was a favorite of the young Emerson. In a sweeping survey of European metaphysics and political philosophy, de Staël praises Locke’s devotion to liberty, but sees him as the originator of a sensationalist school of epistemology that leads to the skepticism of Hume. She finds an attractive contrast in the German tradition that begins with Leibniz and culminates in Kant, which asserts the power and authority of the mind.

James Marsh (1794–1842), a graduate of Andover and the president of the University of Vermont, was equally important for the emerging philosophy of transcendentalism. Marsh was convinced that German philosophy held the key to a reformed theology. His American edition of Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection (1829) introduced Coleridge’s version—much indebted to Schelling—of Kantian terminology, terminology that runs throughout Emerson’s early work. In Nature , for example, Emerson writes: “The Imagination may be defined to be, the use which the Reason makes of the material world” (O, 25).

German philosophy and literature was also championed by Thomas Carlyle, whom Emerson met on his first trip to Europe in 1831. Carlyle’s philosophy of action in such works as Sartor Resartus resonates with Emerson’s idea in “The American Scholar” that action—along with nature and “the mind of the Past” (O, 39) is essential to human education. Along with his countrymen Coleridge and Wordsworth, Carlyle embraced a “natural supernaturalism,” the view that nature, including human beings, has the power and authority traditionally attributed to an independent deity.

Piety towards nature was also a main theme of William Wordsworth, whose poetry was in vogue in America in the 1820s. Wordsworth’s depiction of an active and powerful mind cohered with the shaping power of the mind that his collaborator in the Lyrical Ballads , Samuel Taylor Coleridge, traced to Kant. The idea of such power pervades Emerson’s Nature , where he writes of nature as “obedient” to spirit and counsels each of us to “Build … your own world.” Wordsworth has his more receptive mode as well, in which he calls for “a heart that watches and receives” (in “The Tables Turned”), and we find Emerson’s receptive mode from Nature onward, as when he recounts an ecstatic experience in the woods: “I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing; I see all; The currents of the universal being circulate through me.” (O, 6).

Emerson’s sense that men and women are, as he put it in Nature , gods “in ruins,” led to one of transcendentalism’s defining events, his delivery of an address at the Harvard Divinity School graduation in 1838. Emerson portrayed the contemporary church that the graduates were about to lead as an “eastern monarchy of a Christianity” that had become an “injuror of man” (O, 58). Jesus, in contrast, was a “friend of man.” Yet he was just one of the “true race of prophets,” whose message is not so much their own greatness, as the “greatness of man” (O, 57). Emerson rejects the Unitarian argument that miracles prove the truth of Christianity, not simply because the evidence is weak, but because proof of the sort they envision embodies a mistaken view of the nature of religion: “conversion by miracles is a profanation of the soul.” Emerson’s religion is based not on testimony but on a “perception” that produces a “religious sentiment” (O, 55).

The “Divinity School Address” drew a quick and angry response from Andrews Norton (1786–1853) of the Harvard Divinity School, often known as the “Unitarian Pope.” In “The New School in Literature and Religion” (1838), Norton complains of “a restless craving for notoriety and excitement,” which he traces to German “speculatists” and “barbarians” and “that hyper-Germanized Englishman, Carlyle.” Emerson’s “Address,” he concludes, is at once “an insult to religion” (T, 248) and “an incoherent rhapsody” (T, 249).

An earlier transcendentalist scandal surrounded the publication of Amos Bronson Alcott’s Conversations with Children Upon the Gospels (1836). Alcott (1799–1888) was a self-taught educator from Connecticut who established a series of schools that aimed to “draw out” the intuitive knowledge of children. He found anticipations of his views about a priori knowledge in the writings of Plato and Kant, and support in Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection for the idea that idealism and materiality could be reconciled. Alcott replaced the hard benches of the common schools with more comfortable furniture that he built himself, and left a central space in his classrooms for dancing. The Conversations with Children Upon the Gospels , based on a school Alcott (and his assistant Elizabeth Peabody) ran in Boston, argued that evidence for the truth of Christianity could be found in the unimpeded flow of children’s thought. What people particularly noticed about Alcott’s book, however, were its frank discussions of conception, circumcision, and childbirth. Rather than gaining support for his school, the publication of the book caused many parents to withdraw their children from it, and the school—like many of Alcott’s projects, failed.

Theodore Parker (1810–60) was the son of a farmer who attended Harvard and became a Unitarian minister and accomplished linguist. He published a long critical essay on David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu , and translated Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette’s Introduction to the Old Testament , both of which cast doubt on the divine inspiration and single authorship of the Bible. After the publication of his “A Discourse Concerning the Transient and Permanent in Christianity” (1841) he was invited to resign from the Boston Association of Ministers (he did not), and was no longer welcome in many pulpits. He argued, much as Emerson had in the “Divinity School Address,” that Christianity had nothing essential to do with the person of Jesus: “If Jesus taught at Athens, and not at Jerusalem; if he had wrought no miracle, and none but the human nature had ever been ascribed to him; if the Old Testament had forever perished at his birth, Christianity would still have been the Word of God … just as true, just as lasting, just as beautiful, as now it is…” (T, 352). Parker exploited the similarities between science and religious doctrine to argue that although nature and religious truth are permanent, any merely human version of such truth is transient. In religious doctrines especially, there are stunning reversals, so that “men are burned for professing what men are burned for denying” (T, 347).

Surveying the scene in his 1842 lecture, “The Transcendentalist,” Emerson begins with a philosophical account, according to which what are generally called “new views” are not really new, but rather part of a broad tradition of idealism. It is not a skeptical idealism, however, but an anti-skeptical idealism deriving from Kant:

It is well known to most of my audience, that the Idealism of the present day acquired the name of Transcendental, from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg [sic], who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the experience of the senses, by showing that there was a very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind itself; and he denominated them Transcendental forms (O, 101–2).

Emerson shows here a basic understanding of three Kantian claims, which can be traced throughout his philosophy: that the human mind “forms” experience; that the existence of such mental operations is a counter to skepticism; and that “transcendental” does not mean “transcendent” or beyond human experience altogether, but something through which experience is made possible. Emerson’s idealism is not purely Kantian, however, for (like Coleridge’s) it contains a strong admixture of Neoplatonism and post-Kantian idealism. Emerson thinks of Reason, for example, as a faculty of “vision,” as opposed to the mundane understanding, which “toils all the time, compares, contrives, adds, argues….” ( Letters , vol. 1, 413). For many of the transcendentalists the term “transcendentalism” represented nothing so technical as an inquiry into the presuppositions of human experience, but a new confidence in and appreciation of the mind’s powers, and a modern, non-doctrinal spirituality. The transcendentalist, Emerson states, believes in miracles, conceived as “the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power…” (O, 100).

Emerson keeps his distance from the transcendentalists in his essay by speaking always of what “they” say or do, despite the fact that he was regarded then and is regarded now as the leading transcendentalist. He notes with some disdain that the transcendentalists are “’not good members of society,” that they do not work for “the abolition of the slave-trade” (though both these charges have been leveled at him). He closes the essay nevertheless with a defense of the transcendentalist critique of a society pervaded by “a spirit of cowardly compromise and seeming, which intimates a frightful skepticism, a life without love, and an activity without an aim” (O, 106). This critique is Emerson’s own in such writings as “Self-Reliance,” and “The American Scholar”; and it finds a powerful and original restatement in the “Economy” chapter of Thoreau’s Walden .

The transcendentalists had several publishing outlets: at first The Christian Examiner , then, after the furor over the “Divinity School Address,” The Western Messenger (1835–41) in St Louis, then the Boston Quarterly Review (1838–44). The Dial (1840–4) was a special case, for it was planned and instituted by the members of the Transcendental Club, with Margaret Fuller (1810–50) as the first editor. Emerson succeeded her for the magazine’s last two years. The writing in The Dial was uneven, but in its four years of existence it published Fuller’s “The Great Lawsuit” (the core of her Woman in the Nineteenth Century ) and her long review of Goethe’s work; prose and poetry by Emerson; Alcott’s “Orphic Sayings” (which gave the magazine a reputation for silliness); and the first publications of a young friend of Emerson’s, Henry David Thoreau (1817–62). After Emerson became editor in 1842 The Dial published a series of “Ethnical Scriptures,” translations from Chinese and Indian philosophical works.

Margaret Fuller was the daughter of a Massachusetts congressman who provided tutors for her in Latin, Greek, chemistry, philosophy and, later, German. Exercising what Barbara Packer calls “her peculiar powers of intrusion and caress” (P, 443), Fuller became friends with many of the transcendentalists, including Emerson. In the winters of 1839–44, Fuller organized a series of popular and influential “conversations” for women in Elizabeth Peabody’s bookstore in Boston. She journeyed to the Midwest in the summer of 1843, and published her observations as Summer on the Lakes the following year. After this publishing success, Horace Greeley, a friend of Emerson’s and the editor of the New York Tribune , invited her to New York to write for the Tribune . Fuller abandoned her previously ornate and pretentious style, issuing pithy reviews and forthright criticisms: for example, of Longfellow’s poetry and Carlyle’s attraction to brutality. Fuller was in Europe from 1846–9, sending back hundreds of pages for the Tribune . On her return to America with her husband and son, she drowned in a hurricane off the coast of Fire Island, New York.

Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), a revision of her “Great Lawsuit” manifesto in The Dial , is Fuller’s major philosophical work. She holds that masculinity and femininity pass into one another, that there is “no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman” (T, 418). In classical mythology, for example, “Man partakes of the feminine in the Apollo; woman of the Masculine as Minerva.” But there are differences. The feminine genius is “electrical” and “intuitive,” the male more inclined to classification (T, 419). Women are treated as dependents, however, and their self-reliant impulses are often held against them. What they most want, Fuller maintains, is the freedom to unfold their powers, a freedom necessary not only for their self-development, but for the renovation of society. Like Thoreau and Emerson, Fuller calls for periods of withdrawal from a society whose members are in various states of “distraction” and “imbecility,” and a return only after “the renovating fountains” of individuality have risen up. Such individuality is necessary in particular for the proper constitution of that form of society known as marriage. “Union,” she holds, “is only possible to those who are units” (T, 419). In contrast, most marriages are forms of degradation, in which “the woman does belong to the man, instead of forming a whole with him” (T, 422).

Henry Thoreau studied Latin, Greek, Italian, French, German, and Spanish at Harvard, where he heard Emerson’s “The American Scholar” as the commencement address in 1837. He first published in The Dial when Emerson commissioned him to review a series of reports on wildlife by the state of Massachusetts, but he cast about for a literary outlet after The Dial’ s failure in 1844. In 1845, his move to Walden Pond allowed him to complete his first book, A Week on the Concord and the Merrimac Rivers . He also wrote a first draft of Walden , which eventually appeared in 1854.

Nature comes to even more prominence in Walden than in Emerson’s Nature , which it followed by eighteen years. Nature now becomes particular: this tree, this bird, this state of the pond on a summer evening or winter morning become Thoreau’s subjects. Thoreau is receptive. He finds himself “suddenly neighbor to” rather than a hunter of birds (W, 85); and he learns to dwell in a house that is no more and no less than a place where he can properly sit. From the right perspective, Thoreau finds, he can possess and use a farm with more satisfaction than the farmer, who is preoccupied with feeding his family and expanding his operations.

In Walden ’s opening chapter, “Economy,” Thoreau considers the trade-offs we make in life, and he asks, as Plato did in The Republic , what are life’s real necessities. Like the Roman philosophers Marcus Porcius Cato and Marcus Varro he seeks a “life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust” (W, 15). Considering his contemporaries, he finds that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” (W, 8). Thoreau’s “experiment” at Walden shows that a life of simplicity and independence can be achieved today (W, 17). If Thoreau counsels simple frugality—a vegetarian diet for example, and a dirt floor—he also counsels a kind of extravagance, a spending of what you have in the day that shall never come again. True economy, he writes, is a matter of “improving the nick of time” (W, 17).

Thoreau went to Walden Pond on the anniversary of America’s declared independence from Britain—July 4, 1845, declaring his own independence from a society that is “commonly too cheap.” It is not that he is against all society, but that he finds we meet too often, before we have had the chance to acquire any “new value for each other” (W, 136). Thoreau welcomes those visitors who “speak reservedly and thoughtfully” (W, 141), and who preserve an appropriate sense of distance; he values the little leaves or acorns left by visitors he never meets. Thoreau lived at Walden for just under three years, a time during which he sometimes visited friends and conducted business in town. (It was on one such visit, to pick up a mended shoe, that he was arrested for tax avoidance, an episode that became the occasion for “Resistance to Civil Government.”)

At the opening of Walden’s chapter on “Higher Laws” Thoreau confesses to once having desired to slaughter a woodchuck and eat it raw, just to get at its wild essence. He values fishing and hunting for their taste of wildness, though he finds that in middle age he has given up eating meat. He finds wildness not only in the woods, but in such literary works as Hamlet and the Iliad; and even in certain forms of society: “The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet” (“Walking” (1862), p. 621). The wild is not always consoling or uplifting, however. In The Maine Woods , Thoreau records a climb on Mount Ktaadn in Maine when he confronted the alien materiality of the world; and in Cape Cod (1865), he records the foreignness, not the friendliness, of nature: the shore is “a wild, rank place, and there is no flattery in it” (P, 577).

Although Walden initiates the American tradition of environmental philosophy, it is equally concerned with reading and writing. In the chapter on “Reading,” Thoreau speaks of books that demand and inspire “reading, in a high sense” (W, 104). He calls such books “heroic,” and finds them equally in literature and philosophy, in Europe and Asia: “Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares…” (W, 104). Thoreau suggests that Walden is or aspires to be such a book; and indeed the enduring construction from his time at Walden is not the cabin he built but the book he wrote.

Thoreau maintains in Walden that writing is “the work of art closest to life itself” (W, 102). In his search for such closeness, he began to reconceive the nature of his journal. Both he and Emerson kept journals from which their published works were derived. But in the early 1850s, Thoreau began to conceive of the journal as a work in itself, “each page of which should be written in its own season & out of doors or in its own locality wherever it may be” (J, 67). A journal has a sequence set by the days, but it may have no order; or what order it has emerges in the writer’s life as he meets the life of nature. With its chapters on “Reading,” “Solitude,” “Economy,” “Winter,” and “Spring,” Walden is more “worked up” than the journal; in this sense, Thoreau came to feel, it is less close to nature than the journal.

The transcendentalists operated from the start with the sense that the society around them was seriously deficient: a “mass” of “bugs or spawn” as Emerson put it in “The American Scholar”; slavedrivers of themselves, as Thoreau says in Walden . Thus the attraction of alternative life-styles: Alcott’s ill-fated Fruitlands; Brook Farm, planned and organized by the Transcendental Club; Thoreau’s cabin at Walden. As the nineteenth century came to its mid-point, the transcendentalists’ dissatisfaction with their society became focused on policies and actions of the United States government: the treatment of the Native Americans, the war with Mexico, and, above all, the continuing and expanding practice of slavery.

Emerson’s 1838 letter to President Martin Van Buren is an early expression of the depth of his despair at actions of his country, in this case the ethnic cleansing of American land east of the Mississippi. The 16,000 Cherokees lived in what is now Kentucky and Tennessee, and in parts of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia. They were one of the more assimilated tribes, whose members owned property, drove carriages, used plows and spinning wheels, and even owned slaves. Wealthy Cherokees sent their children to elite academies or seminaries. The Cherokee chief refused to sign a “removal” agreement with the government of Andrew Jackson, but the government found a minority faction to agree to move to territories west of the Mississippi. Despite the ruling by the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall that the Cherokee Nation’s sovereignty had been violated, Jackson’s policies continued to take effect. In 1838, President Van Buren, Jackson’s former Vice-President and approved successor, ordered the U. S. Army into the Cherokee Nation, where they rounded up as many remaining members of the tribe as they could and marched them west and across the Mississippi. Thousands died along the way. In his letter to President Van Buren, Emerson calls this “a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country; for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our Government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country, any more?” (A, 3).

Slavery had existed in the United States from the beginnings of the country, but the question of its morality and entrenchment within the American political system came to the fore with the annexation of Texas, where slavery was legal, and its admission to the Union as the 28th state in 1845. Emerson’s breakout address “On the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies” (1844) was delivered in this context. (The Slavery Abolition Act was passed by the British Parliament in 1833 and celebrated annually in Concord.) In his address Emerson wrote: “Language must be raked, the secrets of slaughter-houses and infamous holes that cannot front the day, must be ransacked, to tell what negro-slavery has been. These men, our benefactors, … the producers of comfort and luxury for the civilized world. … I am heartsick when I read how they came there, and how they are kept there. Their case was left out of the mind and out of the heart of their brothers” (A, 9).

Frederick Douglass spoke in Concord at Thoreau’s invitation, and was on the dais in Concord in August 1844, when Emerson delivered his emancipation address, where he states: “The Black Man carries in his bosom an indispensable element of a new and coming civilization” (Wirzbicki, 95; A, 31). Douglass took up Emerson’s term “self-reliance” in advice to his readers and hearers, and he quotes “The American Scholar” in his abolitionist newspaper North Star . “It is a mischievous notion,” Douglass quotes Emerson as saying, “that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God so is it ever to so much of his attribute that we bring to it” (Wirzbicki, 53; O, 47).

Another important black abolitionist with Transcendentalist leanings and connections was William C. Nell, who founded Boston’s Adelphic Union Library Association in 1836. Nell attended Bronson Alcott’s conversations, heard Emerson speak, and participated in Emerson’s Town and Country Club. He referred to Emerson as the “ever-to-be-honored friend of equal rights” (Wirzbicki, 55). The leadership of Nell’s Association was black, but invited speakers included prominent black and white abolitionists, including Douglass, Wendell Phillips, and Angelina Grimké. Nell founded the New England Freedom Association in 1842 to “extend the helping hand to the ‘chattel’ who may have taken to itself ‘wings’” (Wirzbicki, 148); and he joined with Lewis Hayden (who had escaped slavery in Kentucky) to establish the Boston Vigilance Committee after passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850. Thoreau worked with both Nell and Hayden. He brought Hayden to Concord to speak to the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society, and he contributed to the Underground Railroad by hosting fugitives in his cabin at Walden Pond (Wirzbicki, 158).

Fuller addresses American slavery directly in Woman in the Nineteenth Century , recalling her dread at the news that James K. Polk, a Tennessee slaveholder who favored the extension of slavery to Texas, had been elected the nation’s 11th president (by an all-male electorate). The “choice of the people,” she wrote, “threatens to rivet the chains of slavery and the leprosy of sin permanently on this nation, with the annexation of Texas!” (F, 97). Addressing “[t]he women of my country,” she asks: “have you nothing to do with this? You see the men, how they are willing to sell shamelessly, the happiness of countless generations of fellow-creatures, the honor of their country, and their immortal souls for a money market and political power. Do you not feel within you that which can reprove them, which can check, which can convince them? You would not speak in vain; whether each in her own home, or banded in union” (F, 98).

This call both to the individual and to individuals acting together characterizes Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849). Thoreau was arrested in 1846 for nonpayment of his poll tax, and he took the opportunity presented by his night in jail to meditate on the authority of the state. The government, Thoreau argues, is but an expedient by which we succeed “in letting one another alone” (R, 64). The citizen has no duty to resign his conscience to the state, and may even have a duty to oppose immoral legislation such as that which supports slavery and the Mexican War. Thoreau concludes: “I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also” (R, 67). Slavery could be abolished by a “peaceable revolution,” he continues, if people refused to pay their taxes and clogged the system by going to jail (R, 76).

The Fugitive Slave Law passed by the United States Congress in 1850 had dramatic and visible effects not only in Georgia or Mississippi but in Massachusetts and New York. For the law required all citizens of the country to assist in returning fugitive slaves to their owners. This extension of the slave-system to the north, the subject of Thoreau’s “Slavery in Massachusetts” (1854), was on public view when an escaped slave named Anthony Burns was captured in Boston, tried by a Massachusetts court, and escorted by the Massachusetts militia and U. S. marines to the harbor, where he was taken back to slavery in Virginia. His owner placed him in a notorious “slave pen” outside Richmond, where Burns was handcuffed, chained at the ankles and left to lie in his own filth for four months. Thoreau denounced the absurdity of a court in Boston “trying a MAN, to find out if he is not really a SLAVE,” when the question has already been “decided from eternity” (R, 92). In his “Lecture on Slavery” of 1855, Emerson calls the original 1787 Constitution’s recognition of slavery a “crime” (A, 100), and he contrasts the written law of the constitution with the “Laws” and “Right” ascertained by Jesus, Menu, Moses, and Confucius. An immoral law, he holds, is void.

Although Thoreau advocated nonviolent action in “Resistance to Civil Government,” he later supported the violent actions of John Brown, who killed unarmed pro-slavery settlers in Kansas, and in 1859 attacked the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. In “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” Thoreau portrays Brown as an “Angel of Light” (R, 137) and “a transcendentalist above all” (115) who believed “that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave” (R,132). In early 1860, just months before the outbreak of the Civil War, he and Emerson participated in public commemorations of Brown’s life and actions.

Other Primary Sources

• Buell, Lawrence. The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings , New York: Modern Library, 2006. [Anthology with commentary]
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• –––, The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson , New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1939. 6 vols.
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• –––, “ These Sad But Glorious Days”: Dispatches from Europe, 1846–1850 , Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith (eds.), New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.
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• –––, Journal , John C. Broderick, Elizabeth Hall Witherell, et al. (eds.), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984
• –––, The Maine Woods , Joseph J. Moldenhauer (ed.), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972.
• –––, Political Writings/Thoreau , Nancy L. Rosenbaum (ed.) New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
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• Andrews, Barry Maxwell, 2017. Transcendentalism and the Cultivation of the Soul , Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
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• –––, 2010. On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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• Buell, Lawrence, 1986. New England Literary Culture: From Revolution Through Renaissance , Cambridge University Press.
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• Capper, Charles, 1994/2007. Margaret Fuller: an American Romantic Life , New York: Oxford University Press (Vol. 1, 1994; Vol. 2, 2007).
• Cavell, Stanley, 1981. The Senses of Walden, An Expanded Edition , San Francisco: North Point Press, and University of Chicago Press.
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• –––, 2003. Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes , ed. David Justin Hodge, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• –––, 2004. Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life , Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
• Clebsch, William, 1973. American Religious Thought: a history , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Constantinesco, Thomas, 2012. Ralph Waldo Emerson: L’Amérique à l’essai , Paris: Editions Rue d’Ulm.
• Dewey, John., [1903] 1977. “Ralph Waldo Emerson: Philosopher of Democracy,” in John Dewey: The Middle Works , vol. 3, Jo Ann Boydston (ed.), Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 184–92.
• Firkins, Oscar W., 1915. Ralph Waldo Emerson , Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
• Follett, Danielle, 2015. “The Tension Between Immanence and Dualism in Coleridge and Emerson,” in Romanticism and Philosophy: Thinking with Literature , Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Thomas Constantinesco (eds.), London: Routledge, 209–221.
• Friedl, Herwig, 2018. Thinking in Search of a Language: Essays on American Intellect and Intuition , New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic.
• Furtak, Rick Anthony, James Ellsworth, and Jonathan D. Reid (eds.), 2012. Thoreau’s Importance for Philosophy , New York: Fordham University Press.
• Goodman, Russell B., 1990. American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 1990. “East-West Philosophy in Nineteenth Century America: Emerson and Hinduism,” Journal of the History of Ideas , 51 (4): 625–45.
• –––, 2015. American Philosophy before Pragmatism , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Gross, Robert A., 2021. The Transcendentalists and Their World , New York, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
• Grusin, Richard, 1991. Transcendentalist Hermeneutics: Institutional Authority and the Higher Criticism of the Bible , Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press.
• Harding, Walter, 1965. The Days of Henry Thoreau , New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
• Horsman, Reginald, 1992. Expansion and American Indian policy, 1783–1812 , Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
• –––, 1981. Race and Manifest Destiny: the origins of American racial anglo-saxonism , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Kateb, George, 1992. “Democratic Individuality and the Claims of Politics,” in The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 77–105.
• –––, 1995. Emerson and Self-Reliance , Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
• La Rocca, David and Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso (eds.), 2015. A Power to Translate the World: New Essays on Emerson and International Culture , Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England.
• Lysaker, John T. and Rossi, William, 2009. Emerson and Thoreau: Figures of Friendship , Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
• Marshall, Megan, 2013. Margaret Fuller: A New American Life , Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
• Matthiessen, F. O., 1941. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Miller, Perry, 1967. Nature’s Nation , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Myerson, Joel, 1980. The New England Transcendentalists and the “Dial”: A History of the Magazine and its Contributors , Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
• –––, 1995. The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Packer, B. L., 1982. Emerson’s Fall: A New Interpretation of the Major Essays , New York: Continuum.
• –––, 1995. “The Transcendentalists,” in The Cambridge History of American Literature , Sacvan Bercovitch (ed.), vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 329–604. Reprinted as The Transcendentalists , Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007.
• Poirier, Richard, T., 1987. The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections , New York: Random House.
• –––, 1992. Poetry and Pragmatism , Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
• Porte, Joel, and Morris, Saundra (eds.), 1999. The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Richardson, Robert D. Jr., 1986. Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind , Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
• –––, 1995. Emerson: The Mind on Fire , Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
• Sacks, Kenneth S., 2003. Understanding Emerson: “The American Scholar” and His Struggle for Self-Reliance , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Urbas, Joseph, 2016. Emerson’s Metaphysics: A Song of Laws and Causes , Lanham, MD and London: Lexington Books.
• –––, 2021. The Philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson , New York and Abingdon, Oxon, Routledge.
• Versluis, Arthur, 1993. American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Von Frank, Albert J., 1998. The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Wirzbicki, Peter, 2021. Fighting for the Higher Law: Black and White Transcendentalists Against Slavery , Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Walls, Laura Dassow, 2017. Henry David Thoreau: A Life , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Wright, Conrad, 1957. The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America , Boston: Beacon.
• –––, 1970. The Liberal Christians: Essays on American Unitarian History , Boston: Beacon.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Transcendentalists website by Jone Johnson Lewis (M. Div.), available at the Internet Archive.

civil disobedience | Emerson, Ralph Waldo | Hume, David: on religion | Kant, Immanuel | Kant, Immanuel: transcendental arguments | Thoreau, Henry David

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A bloody American ancestry

Advancing through fear and violence, amassing wealth and power, the Blood dynasty embodied the untamed spirits of a young nation.

By John Banville

John Kaag has a knack of stumbling upon treasures. In a previous book, American Philosophy: A Love Story , he discovered in an old house in the New Hampshire woods a library of precious first editions, many of them by American philosophers of the 19th century who are among his intellectual heroes. In American Bloods – yes, as you might guess, Professor Kaag is himself an American – he unearths the history of a highly influential family from its roots in the north of England all across the United States, from the time of the first settlers up to the present day. The result is a thrilling and illuminating tale.

Kaag, a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, lives in a house not far from the town of Concord, north-west of Boston and hard by Walden Pond. Concord was the birthplace of transcendentalism, that peculiarly American strain of individualist philosophy practised by, among others, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau.

The house in which Kaag and his family live was built in 1745 by one Josiah Blood and his wife, Sarah, and of a night its “warm lights”, Kaag tells us, “peek comfortingly through Tophet Swamp”. Local folk would surely need all the comfort and light to be had, for Tophet was the biblical site where the Canaanites burned their children alive as offerings to the god Moloch. One can see what was on the minds of those fearsome Puritans who first settled on the Eastern Seaboard of the North American continent; their God was no softie, either.

It is in the midst of Tophet Swamp that Kaag, out for a run one bleak November evening, encounters, to his deep consternation, a wolf. This creature is to be the malign mascot of his narrative, loping in repeatedly to remind us of the wild, often savage, origins of the United States.

Deeply shaken after the feral encounter at the aptly named Wolf Rock, Kaag, who had just moved himself and his family into the Blood house, is unable to sleep, and goes down to the living room, to pass the insomniac hours by unpacking cartons and clearing the place by morning. In the process, he discovers a secret room, and in the room “a stack of yellowing paper, an inch thick, bound with a rubber band”.

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What he has chanced on is a history of the Blood family, self-published in 1960, by one Richard Dane Harris, a narrative “sprawling, convoluted, borderline fantastic, riddled with more than five thousand names, all of them Bloods”. Kaag is immediately hooked.

He concedes that there are quite a few more famous American families, such as the Astors and the Roosevelts; the Bloods, however, “unlike many other more visible or iconic American dynasties, consistently, and with remarkable regularity, reveal a particular frontier ethos: their genealogy tracks what Henry David Thoreau called ‘wildness’, an original untamed spirit that would recede in the making of America, but never be extinguished entirely”.

The story begins, however, not on the shores of New England, but in, of all places, 16th-century Ireland, where members of the Blood family fought for England against the last of the great Irish lords, Hugh O’Neill of Ulster, and his almost successful challenge to Elizabethan rule. Here we meet Thomas Blood, who as Kaag wryly informs us “came by his thieving ways as honestly as any man could”. Thomas, a cousin to the earliest American Bloods , made himself notorious by various deeds, the most notable of which was the theft of the British crown jewels from the Tower of London.

This early section of the book is one of the most entertaining, in its swashbuckling sweep and dash. After the theft of the sparklers, Blood and his half-dozen henchmen were quickly captured. It would have been expected that the ringleader would lose his head for this crime against the state; instead, Charles II, the “Merry Monarch”, took a shine to the arch-thief, and granted him “a handsome pension and a place at the royal court”. Sometimes the wages of sin is triumph: Thomas Blood became a figure of legend.

By the time of his death, in 1680, the legend had become tarnished. The epitaph on his gravestone reads in part: “Here let him then by all unpitied lie, And let’s rejoice his time was come to die.” But there were those who believed it was all a trick, that Blood had staged his own death and fled to the New World, “a place”, Kaag writes, “more suited to his savagery”.

The book now moves on to Robert, John and James, the nephews of Thomas Blood. Born in Nottingham, they emigrated to Massachusetts in 1630, perhaps as part of the Winthrop Fleet that arrived in Salem in the summer of that year. By the end of the decade the settlers had made a pact with the indigenous peoples of the area and founded the town of Concord.

It was in Concord that James Blood built a house, “a hulking grey clapboard colonial”, known now as the Old Manse, which was to become, Kaag writes, “one of the most iconic [buildings] in the history of American letters”. It was in an upstairs room of this house, 200 years later, that Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote the first drafts of his early book-length essay “Nature”, one of the foundational texts of transcendentalism.

For a Blood, “James was a very respectable man”, Kaag writes. His cousin Robert was of a very different type. He established Blood Farm, a four-square-mile tract of land stretching north from Concord, and consolidated his power by marrying the well-connected, and wealthy, Elizabeth Willard, whose family had been among the founders of Concord. By this union, the Blood dynasty was firmly established.

Robert Blood, whether he knew it or not, was a Hobbesian to the bone. The 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes witnessed the savageries of the English Civil War that broke out in 1642, and learned hard lessons therefrom. The essence of his social theory is contained in a sentence quoted by Kaag: “The original of all great and lasting societies consists not in the mutual good will men had towards each other, but in the mutual fear they had of each other.”

The fear, and the hatred, that drove the Bloods and their like was directed mainly towards the indigenous population. Concord and settlements like it, Kaag writes, “were regarded as near holy places for the simple reason that they provided rare safe havens from the godless horde that threatened to emerge with torches and tomahawks in the night”.

There was, of course, the other enemy: the British. And sure enough, when the time came to fight them, a Blood was in the thick of it. Thaddeus Blood, born in 1755, was among the minutemen who led the Battle of Concord, in which was fired what Emerson in a poem called “the shot heard round the world”, instituting the American Revolution. Fifty years later Emerson tried to persuade Thaddeus to describe the battle, but the old man was weary. “Leave me,” he said. “Leave me to my repose.” Old soldiers fade away…

It was not all Blood and thunder. The central chapter in Kaag’s book, “The Stargazer”, tells the story of Thaddeus’s son Perez. He was decidedly a man of peace, who lived with his two unmarried sisters and built an observatory in the woodshed to house his home-made telescope which he employed to interrogate the skies. Emerson and Thoreau visited the gentle dreamer, who believed, as Kaag beautifully writes, “that life was made of all that one chose not to ignore”.

American Bloods is a trove of fascinating stories. The family contributed much, for good and ill, to the forging of a nation, “succeeding and failing in all the quintessentially American ways”. In these pages you will meet the engineer Aretas Blood, thanks to whom “the age of electricity [began] in the United States”; James Harvey Blood, whom, Kaag admits, would have been forgotten had he not married Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for the US presidency; the mystic philosopher Benjamin Paul Blood, mentor to the great pragmatist philosopher William James; and a host of other members of this extraordinary family, fashioned so closely to the American grain, and vein.

American Bloods: The Untamed Dynasty That Shaped a Nation John Kaag Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 288pp, £23.99

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[See also: What the Greeks teach us about suicide ]

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This article appears in the 15 May 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Great Stink